On a February morning in 1960, in a bungalow on the far edge of a vanishing empire, the Countess Mountbatten was found dead in her bed. Scattered across the covers lay a pile of letters from the prime minister of India. For thirty years, this woman had been the most talked-about wife in England, mistress of a fortune worth close to four hundred million pounds in today’s money, married to a cousin of the king. Half of fashionable London had passed through her rooms, and her husband had long since stopped pretending to mind.
Yet the letters beside her bed belonged to none of the lovers the gossip columns had spent decades counting. They had come from the one man she was never permitted to keep, whose name no British paper had ever been allowed to set beside hers. The girl who would become that woman was born Edwina Cynthia Annette Ashley in London on the 28th of November 1901. On her father’s side stood the old aristocracy of England; on her mother’s side stood the newest money in Europe, the Cassel millions made in international high finance.
Her mother, Maud, died in 1911, when Edwina was just nine years old, and the warm center of her childhood simply fell away. Her father remarried a cold stepmother, and the clever, grieving girl was left to governesses and the vast silences of very large rooms. The one person who saw her whole was her grandfather, Sir Ernest Cassel, a German-born Jewish outsider who had climbed from a junior clerk’s desk to become one of the richest men in Britain, a private banker and confidant of King Edward VII. He installed her, still a teenager, almost as mistress of Brook House, his enormous mansion on Park Lane.
When Cassel died in September 1921, Edwina inherited a life interest in a trust fund valued at roughly seven million pounds, a sum worth close to four hundred million today. At nineteen, she answered to no living soul for a single penny. The story of her life is the story of what a clever, hungry woman does with that particular combination. On the 18th of July 1922, eight thousand people pressed against the barriers outside St.
Margaret’s Westminster to watch a sailor with no money marry the richest girl in England. The groom was Lord Louis Mountbatten, known to everyone as Dickie, a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, tall, handsome, and ferociously ambitious. At his shoulder as best man stood the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII. The papers called it simply the wedding of the year.
Those who watched with cool eyes understood the bargain inside the romance at once. She was buying blood, rank, and a place at the very center of the royal circle. He was marrying security, style, and the means to live as grandly as his ambitions demanded. The honeymoon announced to the world exactly what kind of couple they intended to be.
They went to America for six months and toured as royalty in all but name, received by President Warren Harding and entertained in Hollywood by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin. But underneath the splendor, the marriage was already showing its shape. Through the 1930s, the couple enjoyed a combined income of about one hundred and thirteen thousand pounds a year before tax, at a time when a member of parliament was paid four hundred pounds and a housemaid might earn thirty. Dickie was forever away at Malta with the fleet or on his endless courses of self-improvement, and Edwina, left to her own devices in the most tempting city on earth, began to arrange her pleasures accordingly, and to arrange them among men.
A friend said of her that for Edwina there was always something missing. By her late twenties, she had begun looking for it in other men’s beds. When a biographer finally assembled the list of her lovers seventy years later, it ran to at least eighteen names. There was Laddie Sanford, a wealthy American polo player; Mike Ward, a man connected to the Beaverbrook press; Bobby Sweeney, an American golf champion; and a host of others whose names have blurred.
She could be dazzlingly generous and glacial in the same afternoon. The men who loved her found her intoxicating and then found her gone. What made it all possible was not daring alone but the architecture of silence that surrounded women of her rank: the wall of money, the wall of libel law, and the wall of deference. In the Britain of the 1920s and 30s, the private lives of the very grand were in effect unprintable.
Her friends knew everything, her servants knew more, and the ordinary reader of an ordinary paper knew nothing whatever. Of all the men, one broke her heart, and one nearly broke the monarchy. The first was Harold Phillips, known as Bunny, an officer in the Coldstream Guards, by the considered judgment of the biographers the great love of Edwina’s life. When Bunny at last married another woman, Edwina was devastated.
The second name was Leslie Hutchinson, known as Hutch, a cabaret pianist and singer from the island of Grenada, one of the most glamorous performers in Britain. That a black colonial entertainer and a white countess should be linked together in the London of the early 1930s struck at once at the two most sensitive nerves the British establishment possessed: class and race. It is Hutch, most historians now believe, who was the real object of the affair, though the story was never proved in any courtroom. In May 1932, a Sunday paper called the People printed a coded paragraph about a scandal that had shaken society to its depths, describing a titled woman whose association with a colored man had become the talk of the West End.
No name was printed, but everyone who mattered in London read it instantly as Edwina Mountbatten, and the rumor mill obligingly supplied the name of Paul Robeson, a far more famous performer whom Edwina had in all probability never so much as met. King George V, terrified of anything that might drag his family’s circle into the gutter of scandal, ordered the Mountbattens home to sue. The case came on in July 1932 before the Lord Chief Justice. Edwina went into the witness box herself and swore upon oath that the story was false from its first word to its last.
The newspaper crumpled completely, withdrew the allegation, and accepted a crushing defeat. Edwina took her costs in full and declined to accept any damages at all. That evening she was seen out celebrating, and the following day she lunched at Buckingham Palace with the king and queen. What the trial had protected was not a wronged innocent but an open secret.
The specific charge was false, but the general truth, that Edwina Mountbatton was a woman of many lovers living inside a marriage that had long since stopped pretending to be faithful, was accurate to the last detail. The marriage survived, reformed into what her daughter Pamela would one day describe as a modus vivendi. When Dickie found out about Edwina’s affairs, there were terrible scenes and the couple came within sight of the divorce court. Instead they agreed to an open marriage.
Both would be free, and both would preserve absolutely the outward form of a devoted and respectable union. Dickie’s own attachment was to Yola Letellier, a charming young Frenchwoman, and when Edwina, who had strayed first and strayed most, found herself wild with rage over her husband’s lover, she did the thing that turned the whole triangle into something almost warm. She befriended Yola, spent time in her company, and wrote approvingly of her to her husband afterwards. When the bombs began to fall on London in the autumn of 1939, the woman the gossip columns had mocked for a decade found the one thing they could never take from her: a purpose.
She threw herself into the work of the St. John Ambulance Brigade. In November 1939 she became county president for London; by 1942 she had risen to superintendent-in-chief, the most senior woman in the entire organization, a post she would hold for eighteen years. She built shelter schemes across a capital being pounded night after night from the air, went down into the underground stations where Londoners huddled, and toured the bombed streets while the fires still burned.
In 1943 she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the first of the honors that would crowd her breast. In the wreckage of the Japanese surrender in 1945, she took on the coordination of the rescue of prisoners of war in Southeast Asia. Working through the organizations she led, she helped to oversee the recovery of something in the order of ninety thousand prisoners scattered across roughly two hundred and thirty separate camps spread over three thousand miles of ruined territory. She personally flew close to thirty-three thousand miles, going into the camps themselves, walking among the skeletal survivors, inspecting conditions, and then making the demands that turned inspection into action.
To thousands of prisoners, the very first sign that the outside world had remembered they were alive was the arrival of Lady Louis Mountbatten, notebook in hand, refusing to be hurried and refusing absolutely to be lied to. The honors followed: Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in 1946, Dame Grand Cross of the Order of St. John, and in 1948 the Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire. In the spring of 1947, she walked into a palace of 340 rooms to preside over the death of the largest empire the world had ever known.
Her husband had been sent out to India as its last viceroy, charged with bringing the greatest possession of the empire to independence, and doing it fast. She took up residence in Viceroy’s House, the vast palace designed by Lutyens, knowing with complete certainty that she would be the very last English woman ever to reign inside its walls. She arrived with twenty solid years of relief experience behind her and a whole subcontinent sliding towards catastrophe in front of her, and she went straight to work, touring hospitals and welfare centers and taking command of the humanitarian side of the transfer of power. Independence came in August 1947, and with partition came the catastrophe everyone had feared.
Along the new frontiers, Hindus and Sikhs fled one way and Muslims the other, set upon and slaughtered as they fled. The estimates of the dead range from several hundred thousand at the lowest to a million and more at the highest; the displaced run as high as fifteen million. Edwina took charge of the United Council for Relief and Welfare and threw everything she had at the disaster. She organized the vast refugee camps, drove the vaccination campaigns against cholera, fought for water and sanitation, and did it all while walking through the wards herself.
She worked far past the point of exhaustion, and the leaders of the new India came to regard her with genuine and lasting affection because they had watched her serve their people at the very worst moment in their modern history. Among those who watched her most closely was the new prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. He was a widower, cultured and lonely and idealistic, a man who had spent years of his life in British prisons for the cause of Indian freedom. With Nehru, there was no question at all of the quick conquest and still quicker discarding that had defined every one of her affairs.
Here at last was an equal. There was, she said, a strange relationship between them, most of it spiritual. Whether it was ever also a physical love is the question the world will not stop asking. Her daughter Pamela insisted flatly that it was never physical at all, describing her mother and Nehru and her father as a happy threesome.
The biographer Andrew Lownie inclines instead to the view that it was indeed physical. Four people who knew her gave four different answers; the most intimate of the letters between them remains sealed to this day in India, unread. The strangest part of the whole thing is what her husband chose to do when he found out about it. The moment came in 1952.
Edwina, badly frightened by an episode of illness, showed Dickie the letters that Nehru had written to her. What he wrote back to her is the single most remarkable document in the entire story. He told her that he knew and had always understood the very special relationship that existed between Jawaharlal and herself, and explained why it did not wound him, saying that by the remarkably lucky fact that among his many defects, God had not seen fit to add jealousy, he had been spared the ordinary agony of the ordinary husband. He was not merely tolerating the bond; he was actively helping it along, smoothing the path between his own wife and the Indian prime minister.
A proud man setting down in his own ink that he would very much rather his wife were happy in the love of another than unhappy in her duty to him. The 1950s used her very hard. The angina came upon her in 1956, a small stroke followed two years later, and she calmly ignored the whole lot of them because the relief work would not wait. In February 1960, the moving carried her to Jesselton, a town on the northern coast of Borneo, humid and remote, a world away from the giant’s house where the whole story had begun.
She spent her last day inspecting the local work of the brigade she had led for eighteen years, and then she went to bed in the warm dark with the letters of the prime minister of India near at hand, as they always were. In the night, her heart finally stopped. She was fifty-eight years old, and when they found her in the morning, there was the scattered pile of Nehru’s letters lying across the bed. She had asked to be buried at sea.
On the 25th of February 1960, her wish was carried out from the deck of the frigate Wakeful off Portsmouth, with the Archbishop of Canterbury officiating. And then came the gesture that no one could have predicted. Nehru, on learning that the woman he had loved was to be given to the sea, ordered a warship of the Indian Navy, the frigate Trishul, to sail all the way to Portsmouth and take its part in the burial. As the English frigate committed Edwina’s body to the deep, the Indian frigate stood by on the water beside it, and a wreath of marigolds, the flowers of Indian mourning, was cast upon the waves in her memory.
The Queen Mother, on hearing of it, produced the line that Edwina’s family have treasured ever since: “Dear Edwina, she always did like to make a splash. ”
When the accounts of her life were finally settled, the great Cassel fortune had shrunk to a shadow of what it had once been. Her personal estate came to a gross figure of some five hundred and eighty-nine thousand pounds, and more than half of it was taken in death duties. The thing that survived her was not the money.
Broadlands still stands in its Hampshire parkland, and the work of the St. John Ambulance Brigade lives on after her. The two Edwinas were both entirely real: the bored heiress who chased sensation through the nightclubs and across the oceans, and the woman of the camps who flew thirty-three thousand miles to bring ninety thousand prisoners home and walked into the cholera wards of a partitioning subcontinent. The idle woman and the heroine shared a body, a temperament, and a hunger.
The whole meaning of her life lies in the fact that the second grew directly out of the first, that the very restlessness which had made her a scandal was the thing that made her in the end magnificent once the world at last handed her something large enough to spend it on. And then of course there are the letters. Somewhere in India, sealed and private and unread, the most intimate part of the Nehru correspondence still waits, keeping its secret exactly as faithfully as its owner once kept hers. It is the reason the central question of her whole life can never now be finally closed.
Edwina Mountbatten was by any measure the age could offer the freest woman in England, richer than dukes, married into the very heart of the royal family, answerable to no living person for a single penny of her own. And she spent thirty long years of that freedom slowly discovering the hardest truth of her life: that a freedom bought with a fortune is not at all the same thing as a purpose worth the having. At the very last, on a narrow bed in a bungalow in Borneo, at the far edge of the very empire that her own marriage had helped to bury, the Countess Mountbatten was found lying dead, with the letters of the Prime Minister of India scattered across her bed, the letters of the one man she was never in all her life permitted to keep, and the whole truth of what had passed between them sealed away for good.